Monday, July 27, 2009

Yes...It's Really Happening! I Saw It With My Own Two Eyes (and one lens)

So today was the day the new Idaho Potato Commission Video Board started to go up in Holt Arena. I don't get very misty eyed much anymore (I'm fairly jaded), but as much as a tear dribbled out of my eye when Ray Bourque finally lifted the Stanley Cup, or the overflow on the plane to Hawaii reading about Tony Dungy's son, well, I pulled a Daniel Ocean-watching-Oprah today, and so I grabbed our trusty old (like seven years old) digital camera to let you folks see what's going on....

Here is the left side of the board, which isn't changing. You can see there is emptiness to the right of it, and also the clock is missing. Above the got milk? ad it used to say Idaho State University, but I believe that is now where the Idaho Potato Commission logo and stuff is going. Don't remember the Idaho State University sign?

Well, this is it...on the Holt floor. If it looks a little lonely to you, don't worry, his good friend the clock is right in front of him....

See?

Finally...the new board...you can see the first two panels of the four are in place along the bottom (nearly 16 feet across....right now about my height 5-9 or so). There will be all sorts of board around it as well to make it blend in.

This is what the other two boards look like sitting in the crates waiting for installation. Those oval things are actually the doors for housing all the wiring and stuff.

What the boards look like from the side.

OK, this is cool....I got right next to it and shot this picture. The little red green and blue dots make up one pixel, and the board is 200 pixels by 288. the better your board, the closer these dots are to each other. The dots on ours is 17 millimeters apart (the best is 15, Utah and BYU have 19 millimeter boards for comparison). So, those dots can combined based on the intensity to showcase over 4,000 colors, meaning the board will be very bright, and very sharp. When you are looking at the board from like 20 feet away, you can't even see the different colored lights....it's pretty nifty.

I had this last one taken so you can get a gauge of the height of these things...the test will run sometime Wednesday, and then a bunch of us will get training on Thursday, which will be way cool.

3 comments:

Great post Frank, nice to see some pics! This is a big move in the right direction, and we have heard there is more to come. The staff is doing a fine job, and it is nice to see progress. By the way, we have the bengal blog on our blogroll. Many of the athletes in this area read our blog and so do their parents, this is good for them to see.